From Hospital to Criminal Justice Complex

Abstract

This article analyses the conversion of a big hospital and teaching complex, designed between 1968 and 1978 and commissioned by Santa Casa de Misericórdia de São Paulo to a team of architects led by Fábio Moura Penteado, into the biggest criminal justice complex in Latin America, since it was acquired by the State of São Paulo in the mid-1990s and opened in 1999. The architectural characteristics and the superlative scale of the complex constitute a privileged object to analyze the potentialities and limits of architectural flexibility, as well as how this concept is related to the modern project culture, specifically with the general strategies developed by the so-called Escola Paulista.

Keywords

• modern hospitals
• healtcare architecture
• brazilian brutalist architecture
• architectural flexibility
• adaptable design